Don't be Afraid to Try...

Gluten free baking works best when you don’t have any preconceived notions as to what dishes should look and taste like. Pretend you have a blank slate before you, this mind set leaves you open to experiment freely and have fun doing it. My kitchen freezer is filled with both good and failed samples. My liberating moment came when I recently tried to copy a lemon GF torte I bought at a bakery which sells each tiny piece for $5 a piece. After reading the ingredient list, I set to work finding something similar. After eleven, yes 11 tries, I came up with something similar. That is the texture, weight, appearance and of course, taste is close to the original. Unfortunately, that something similar was loaded and I mean loaded with sugar! I now find the product so revolting I can’t get myself to buy what was once my favorite treat.

I decided to turn my thinking around. If I had no notion of what a lemon torte tasted like could I make something that was just plain good on it’s on. Say, you were the first person in existence who had an oven, ingredients and you just wanted to make something good. Without the constraints of keeping to the formula, this new found freedom allowed me to develop more creative and better cakes than the original. I was no longer confined to just cornstarch or rice flour but could now open up to use amaranth, teff, buckwheat, fava flours. The sugar alternatives like maple, coconut, tapioca, brown rice were now part of an exciting repertoire of tastes.

All that said, there is no need to reinvent the proverbial baking wheel. Follow a good recipe, pay attention how your different flours behave when baked, how your different sugars affect the mouth feel and structure, how your baked goods will be leavened to hold height. Try substituting one ingredient at a time – take pictures and notes of your results. Most of all have fun, don’t think of the substitution as being a bad thing but a chance to possibly make an already good dish great. In the next few months, we can discover new ingredients together and you can suggest anything you’ve tried. All us collectively, can try different things in our search, sharing and learning as we go. We have at our disposal more varieties than a regular baker so go out bravely and have a great time discovering!!